This application relates to methods for dispensing pharmaceuticals and, in particular, to automated methods for filling prescriptions in customer orders.
Historically, pharmacies have filled large quantities of customer orders for skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, independent living facilities, group homes, hospice facilities and other configurations of the nursing home industry and institutionalized long term care industry with a labor-intensive, pharmacist-based assembly line method. The customer orders are comprised of patient prescriptions, issued by a physician and fulfilled under close pharmacist supervision. The filling of prescriptions consists of executing the customer order by associating the correct pharmaceutical product with the correct prescription label. This is done by pharmacists, technicians, or combinations of these individuals. Products, in the form of a variety of packages (e.g., 7-day, 14-day, 15-day, 30-day dosages, and individually by form and strength), are removed from bulk inventory and, thereafter, a prescription label is printed and manually applied to the appropriate product.
This act of application may then be verified in one of many ways. It can be checked against a master order sheet (MAR), visually checked by the technician, pharmacist, or a combination of these individuals, or can be verified by manually scanning the information on the prescription label with that of the product label. Once each product is labeled, then the labeled products are grouped and presorted into containers. The presorted containers are broken down in a sortation area where the products are individually scanned and placed into the shipping containers (e.g., boxes, bags, bins, or totes). Typically at this point, the label application is re-verified and the product's association with the particular shipping container is checked. This is a barcode-scanning step where the package label, the prescription label, and the shipping tote (or a combination of any number of these items) are confirmed to be correct.
By the time a labeled and verified product is correctly placed in a shipping tote, it has typically been handled, or touched, by an individual approximately ten to thirteen times. The large number of touches required to process products represents inefficiencies and increases the potential for human error. Therefore, there remains significant room for improvement in the methodologies used by pharmacies to fill prescriptions against customer orders.
Improved systems and methods are needed to automatically label, verify, and handle products to fulfill customer orders.